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Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

It has taken me an incredibly long time to pick up this book, and i couldn’t have picked it up without prompt, admittedly. Never Let Me Go was the first in my line of ‘my friends favourite books’ i’m going to read this year, and i’m really glad i started this challenge!

Never Let Me Go is the favourite book of Sophie and also my current partner – so i actually can get two done in one here! I’ve had it on my shelf for a good few years now, picking it up when there was a lot of hype over the movie. However it has taken me until now to be pushed in to reading it. Something about the story or maybe the movie cover, or even the time it’s been on my shelf has put me off this novel. I somewhat regret that and somewhat don’t.

First of all, i feel like i’ve missed out a lot with this story. I could have spent years loving it before now, and most people know the story well at this point and i’ve lost so much time adoring these characters. On the flip side, i’m really glad that i left it until my early twenties so i could connect with the story more, understand it and more importantly, really love the characters.

By far Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were my favourite thing about this story. Their friendship dynamic is one of my new favourites in literature and the way their characters were written made them feel so incredibly real. I loved the was Ruth was so direct and volatile, it made her seem alive. Kathy is one of my new favourite characters of all time. I found her to be so loving and nurturing without the downfall of most characters of this nature – naivety. She was level headed throughout and it took someone like that to tell this story. She seemed like the perfect voice for how this very dramatic story was written.

I’m not huge on dystopian novels, i find them quite difficult to follow, but the writing of Never Let Me Go made everything easy to digest with also giving enough space to let you figure out what was happening on your own. It’s completely told from character perspective which was a wonderful addition to the way it read. The world building was just different enough for it to feel dystopian, but i definitely appreciated the setting of England so i could truly immerse myself in the story and imagine it happening.

The main issue that i had with this novel was the amount of back story that was thrown in at the beginning. Overall it set the scene incredibly well and made the reader extremely aware of the world that was being built and we were thrown in to, however for me, the ninety or so pages it covered was a little too much. There was a lot of back tracking i didn’t enjoy when i wanted to get in to the story itself.

I’m already aware that this is a well loved and well received story, and i’m glad that i can now join in conversation about how wonderfully written it is and how these characters can really make a difference to lives.